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Musielle- Thank you for the information. The prices would not be unreasonable at all if the dollar and Euro were more or less the same in value as was originally intended. Maybe with a new president things will get somewhat better into balance. But at 11.90 Euros each, an American will have to pay about $19 per lever, which is just about what I expected. As I said, it’s not your fault, and your prices are not unreasonable. We’ll just have to wait and see if people are really willing to pay the higher price.
Ann- Any time you make a significant change to your technique, there will initially be some, or a lot of discomfort. It doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong. What is happening is that you have muscle memory for a certain way of doing things, and the new way is doing battle with the old. As the old muscle memory fades and new muscle memory is developed for the new way you are doing things, it will get more comfortable.
Bonnie- This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with a very important European harpist-one of the best in the world- who had premiered many new concertos. She told me that she finally threw in the towel, because she would spend half a year or more learning the piece and then would not get more than one performance out of it.
I’m not going to respond directly to posts that have been put on this thread because I have not read all of them yet. But I do want to say that there is a larger picture. I own a copy of ‘The concise(meaning the shorter version) Bakers Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. It’s over 1100 pages long. I have no idea how many composers are listed in there. But 99.9% of them you’ve never heard of. The point is, in every age, less than 1% of the music composed makes it into the standard repertoire. We too have to suffer through many bad pieces in order to hear the occasional good one. And I don’t think anyone, critics included, can predict which pieces are going to last.
At the same time, I believe there are hidden gems that are waiting to be rediscovered. Yesterday on our local classical music station I heard a Symphony by Hans Rott. He composed it when he was 20 in 1878 and was hailed by Mahler and other major composers of the day as the greatest new composer of the age. The symphony was absolutely riveting; a gigantic piece that bore an uncanny resemblance to symphonies that Mahler would later compose. I stopped what I was doing in the shop, turned off the machinery and stood there listening to this glorious symphony for almost a half hour. I never do that. Rott died by suicide at the age of 24, having burned many other pieces that he had composed. So almost nothing remains today of his music. What an incomprehensible tragedy. I got out my copy of Baker’s and Rott is not even in there! Only time will tell with any composer what will survive and what will not.
David- I studied with Pierre Jamet, one of the great harpists and harp teachers of the last century. He had fingernails just like yours and it didn’t bother him a bit. Actually, my fingernails detach from the skins back from the tip of my finger(I think like most people), and I worried for a long time that that would cause problems. It sometimes does. If I’m not careful I can catch a string with the fingernail instead of the tip of the finger. But I always find a way to avoid that.
Harp technique is a format that helps you use your hand in the most efficient way possible and helps you produce a beautiful sound. But the specifics of any technical approach have to be tailored to your hand and abilities. And much of that fine tuning has to be done by you yourself with the guidance of your teacher. Trust me, you’ll be fine.
Bernhard– The big question is: How much do they cost? They look expensive. And Americans, thanks to the disastrous economy created by George Bush and the Republican party, have to add 60% to the price because of the lowered value of the dollar. I suspect that they are way too expensive for practical use.
And before anybody jumps on me over this, the question is this. If you buy a 36 string lever harp and these levers cost say, $20 per lever, then the levers alone, without the cost of installing them, is $720. Installing them will bring the total cost to at least $1,000, and probably more. So instead of paying say $3,000 for your lever harp, the cost goes up to $4,000 if it has these levers.
Christian- I seem to remember that when I tried to download pictures from photobucket to here, it worked using Firefox but didn’t work using Safari. So if you have trouble on the one, try the other. Good luck. Hopefully you’re not as hoplessly inept with computers as I am!
And Brandee- I burst out laughing at your comment about the HUGE size of the picture. Thanks.
christian= I went through this a year ago. Barbara Brundage was a saint in helping me to figure out how to do this on a Mac. It’s been so long that I don’t remember all the details anymore. But I used photobucket I think. You have to put the photos there first, then download them to this site from Photobucket. But I remember it was trial and error in figuring out which commands worked.
Gayle-Congratulations on your work ethic and dedication to learning the harp. All these posts have some good ideas and you’ll need to pick and choose the ones that work for you. Here are a few more.
Try changing your practice habits. Practicing means pulling the piece apart and playing it in a way different from the final version. That means practicing(a lot) hands separately, or one or two measures at a time. Playing through a piece, beginning to end, is the worst thing you can do when you are trying to learn a piece.
If a particular pattern is giving you a hard time, like chords, then make an exercise out of that and spend a half hour just playing chords. For this reason I find that etudes are critically important to fixing technical problems and advancing your technique. Read my article that appeared in a recent Harp Column about using Etudes to improve your technique.
When you practice a piece you are trying to learn, start by going directly to the trouble spots and working on them first. Try putting a check mark or X above the music every time you trip or have to stop and regroup. There will be a lot of them at first. Then as you learn to play through each one with no trouble, remove the mark. That will help chart your progress and motivate you.
Lastly, learning any musical instrument is a process, and for me the process is the the fun part. Enjoy the act of learning a piece, of fixing a problem, and don’t focus too much on the finished product. Trust me, no matter what level you play at, the piece is never finished.
Ann- What a wonderful post. Very thoughtful and informative. I guess the point of my original post was this: If an adult beginner applys himself/herself in the same way that a serious child student does, working on the technical aspects with the same dedication and alotment of time, and plays what the teacher assigns, without skipping 5 levels of difficulty, will the adult student achieve the same results? I don’t know the answer. I do know from teaching English as a foreign language to French businessmen for two years, that there is a big difference between teaching children a language and teaching adults. Some adults are very adept at learning a new language and some are incredibly inept, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. So maybe the same thing exists with teaching an instrument to an adult. Or maybe the problem, particularly with adults who have never studied an instrument, is that such an adult has no concept of the discipline that learning an instrument requires, and that’s what holds them back. Again, I don’t know.
David- That’s wonderful. There are some modern surgeries that are just miraculous, and that is one of them.
Jerusha- I just found the CD. It was put out by Quantum and has the number QM 6897 and contains both a Quintette and a Trio(no harp) as well as La Flute de Pan. All pieces are by Jean Cras, but only the Quintette has harp. Hope this helps.
It’s not just getting on the site that is a problem for me. A lot of times I have trouble going from one page to another, or posting as well. I keep getting SERVER ERROR. Eventually I get to where I want to go. But it is frustrating. Kim and Hugh, are you listening?
I agree entirely with the above post. But musical expression is also an issue of technique. Technique is not simply the ability to hit the notes. It’s the ability to play them the way you want. When I teach students at the lower levels, the first couple of times we encounter a ritard for example it is uneven and lumpy. The slow down too quickly or too abruptly. So it’s a matter of practicing a controlled ritard and learning how to pace it. The same with a crescendo. The first time you try to do an even crescendo, the first few notes will be quiet and then abruptly the next ones will be loud. These are issues of technique. You have to be able to control how each note or each group of notes comes out. So you may have musical ideas that you want to express, but you have to have the control and technique to express them. Otherwise they simply won’t come out. My suggestion is that you focus as much on technique, especially etudes, as on your pieces, and when you play the etudes, fool around with dynamics and tempo so that you learn to control those things. Then when you go back to your pieces, you’ll have the control to do what you want musically.
